New mod_virgule
code is live today on Advogato. See the changelog
for the details. No new release yet, though. I'm hoping
I'll find time to finish up a couple of additional things
before the next release.

The feed aggregator can now handle RSS/ATOM feeds that
include the blog content as unescaped XHTML within the feed
XML tree instead of as escaped content within a single XML
node. This seems like a risky approach since the slightest
markup error in the blog's XHTML renders the whole feed
invalid and unparsable. Worse, the particular ATOM feed
that brought this problem to light, generated by blogger,
appears to randomly alternate between the two methods. One
post is carried as normal escaped content within the entry
node and the next is shoved in as an unescaped tree of XHTML
tags. But who am I to argue with blogger? If it exists in
the wild and doesn't appear to violate the standards, I'll
try to make mod_virgule handle it correctly.

I've added support for the foaf:mbox_sha1sum
field in the
FOAF files output by mod_virgule. This field is an SHA-1
hash of the user email address. It's used as an identifier
by some FOAF applications. There is also a group working on
a SpamAssassin plugin and email whitelist database that will
use trust metrics and FOAF data collected from community
sites like Advogato. The email field in the user profile
used to be optional, so if you're an old time Advogato user,
check your profile and make sure your email address is
included. Actually, everyone ought to make sure their email
address is current, just in case you need to use the
password reminder some day.

Blog (diary) pages are now template based rather than
hard coded HTML generated by mod_virgule. The blog page
template includes the new page header.

Google turned down Advogato's Summer of Code mentor
application. While disappointing, this didn't come as a
total shock. There's no official organization behind
mod_virgule, it's a very small project, and it still seems
to be viewed as dead or dying by a few people.
That's okay, maybe next year. In the meantime, I'm going to
continue working to bring mod_virgule up to
date.

There are several badly needed features that are going
to require some major code refactoring and code cleanup.
One of the Summer of Code ideas was directly
related to this. The existing code base desperately needs
improved commenting and documentation. I'd really like to
see the comments normalized to Doxygen style and comments
added to all the currently uncommented sections of the code.
Having better comments and documentation would really help
with future refactoring of the code and would also lower the
barrier for new developers who need to understand how
mod_virgule works. Any volunteers? Adding and rewriting code
comments doesn't require extensive programming skill (though
you will need to be able read and understand some less than
beautiful C code).

There are other SoC
mod_virgule ideas that I'd still like to see someone
help with. Even without Google funding, it's still good
experience and might even be fun. If you think you might be
interested in helping out, take a look at the ideas list and
let me know.